Nium and Swift to enable FIs to facilitate real-time payments

By Gloria Mathias

Nium, the global infrastructure for real-time cross-border payments, has announced that financial institutions can now leverage Swift capabilities and their existing Swift infrastructure to connect to Nium’s global real-time payments network.

This connection provides an efficient and cost-effective solution for financial institutions to connect to Nium’s global infrastructure, eliminating the need for costly and resource-intensive API integrations. Cross-border payments initiated via Swift can be completed on Nium’s network, resulting in faster settlement, end-to-end transparency, and full traceability for the most popular corridors.

Navigating disparate financial systems and message formats can be a barrier to market expansion for global businesses. The lack of standardisation, coupled with the need for tailored integrations, often limits access to new opportunities. However, as the industry moves toward more standardisation, Nium looks to serve as a payment messaging facilitator, supporting existing messaging formats while bridging the path to new standards.

This connection supports Swift MT message formats and ISO 20022 messaging, the latter of which the industry is in the process of migrating as the new standard of cross-border payments worldwide.

“Nium has become the connecting point to the world of real-time money movement,” said Alex Johnson, Chief Payments Officer at Nium. “Our global network includes connections to all the popular real-time payment systems. We understand that integrating with a new set of APIs can require significant investment from already resource-constrained teams. This new capability makes it easy to redirect existing payment flows to Nium and benefit almost immediately from the speed, transparency, and security of our real-time payments network.”

The initiative limits integration efforts, streamlines transaction screening and monitoring processes, provides transparency on payment costs, and minimises intermediaries, resulting in fewer points of failure, better error handling, and improved data flow. Additionally, given Nium’s “zero-deduction” flows, beneficiaries are guaranteed to receive the total amount sent without additional fees.